The men can vote, take tennis lessons, watch their porn videos, throw parties, have sex with other men at the hospital, play bass in a jazz combo. They just can't leave.

More states have signed up to the Coalinga model - including, recently, New York. If a lifelong country club-style internment is the price of keeping paedophiles off the streets, many appear to be willing to pay it.

"As long as we can keep decreasing our bills we can keep making less money."

Trading money for time together. A trend? A good trend regardless of the condition of the economy? There's a lot you can say about this, but I'm taking it from a Peggy Noonan column, so let's see where Peggy goes with it:

The cities and suburbs of America are about to get rougher-looking. This will not be all bad. There will be a certain authenticity chic. Storefronts, pristine buildings—all will spend less on upkeep, and gleam less.

So will humans. People will be allowed to grow old again. There will be a certain liberation in this. There will be fewer facelifts and browlifts, less Botox, less dyed hair among both men and women. They will look more like people used to look, before perfection came in. Middle-aged bodies will be thicker and softer, with more maternal and paternal give. There will be fewer gyms and fewer trainers, but more walking. Gym machines produced the pumped and cut look. They won't be so affordable now....

This will be the return of an old WASP style: the good, frayed carpet; dogs that look like dogs and not a hairdo in a teacup....

More families will have to live together. More people will drink more regularly. Secret smoking will make a comeback as part of a return to simple pleasures. People will slow down. Mainstream religion will come back.... Bland affluence breeds fundamentalism. Bland affluence is over.

In the struggle between 2 principles, in the mind of Obama, government transparency won.

"It was a weighty decision. As with so many issues, there are competing points of view that flow from very genuine interests and concerns that are to be respected. And then the president has to synthesize all of it and make a decision that’s in the broad national interest. He’s been thinking about this for four weeks, really."

Although evidence shows that the Army Field Manual, which is available online, is already used by al Qaeda for training purposes, it was certainly the president's right to suspend use of any technique. However, public disclosure of the OLC opinions, and thus of the techniques themselves, assures that terrorists are now aware of the absolute limit of what the U.S. government could do to extract information from them, and can supplement their training accordingly and thus diminish the effectiveness of these techniques as they have the ones in the Army Field Manual....

The techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of the techniques discussed in these opinions. As already disclosed by Director Hayden, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations.

It is one thing for a person born as a man who has been surgically altered to become a woman to be allowed to use the women's bathroom. It is something else entirely to allow a man who has had nothing altered, but simply claims he "identifies" as a woman, to use the women's bathroom.

That is a recipe for embarrassment, fear and even confrontation — the kind of things most legislators would probably say they want to prevent. The New Hampshire House of Representatives, which passed a similar law recently, may find it has been hasty....

[T[he various definitions of transgender are so amorphous and broad. According to one, it is "a general term applied to a variety of individuals, behaviors, and groups involving tendencies that diverge from the normative role (man or woman) commonly, but not always, assigned at birth, as well as the role traditionally held by society."...

April 16, 2009

For CNN, MSNBC and other media outlets, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to use the word "teabagging" in a sentence. Teabagging, for those who don't live in a frat house, refers to a sexual act involving part of the male genitalia and a second person's face or mouth.

So when the anti-tax "tea party" protests were held Wednesday across the country, cable anchors and guests -- who for weeks had all but ignored the story -- covered the protests by cracking a litany of barely concealed sexual references.

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper interspersed "teabagging" references with analyst David Gergen's more staid commentary on how Republicans are still "searching for their voice." "It's hard to talk when you're teabagging," Cooper explained. Gergen laughed, but Cooper kept a straight face.

MSNBC's David Shuster weaved a tapestry of "Animal House" humor Monday as he filled in for Countdown host Keith Olbermann. The protests, he explained, amount to "Teabagging day for the right wing and they are going nuts for it."

He described the parties as simultaneously "full-throated" and "toothless," and continued: "They want to give President Obama a strong tongue-lashing and lick government spending." Shuster also noted how the protesters "whipped out" the demonstrations this past weekend.

ADDED: "You would like to place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us that he appears to have a fear of insects. In particular, you would like to tell Zubaydah that you intend to place a stinging insect in the box with him. You would, however, place a harmless insect in the box. You have orally informed us that you would in fact place a harmless insect such as a caterpillar in the box with him." (PDF.)

AND: Are Jane Hamsher and her friends standing there with torches and pitchforks?

Whether that was you or not, I thank you for reading! I am endlessly happy to have readers — and commenters! I've gone 5 years, 3 months, and 3 days, posting every single day, and I have never lost the great, energizing feeling of knowing that someone is reading. In the beginning, I hoped to get to the level of 60 readers a day that my colleague had and looked with envy at another lawprof who'd worked his way up to 400 readers a day. I remember in my first year thinking how great it would be to hit the 1 million mark and not quite making it. Anyway, now I've hit 20 million. That's pretty cool! Thanks!

SO I COVERED THE KNOXVILLE TEA PARTY LIVE, with an experimental (I kludged it together myself!) wireless broadband camera rig consisting of a JVC pro DV camera firewired into my Macbook Pro, then connecting to PJTV studios over iChat using a Verizon broadband card. It worked pretty well — but, mostly, I was just relieved that it worked.

— and I encountered that screen full of crap.

How can anyone possibly think it will work to combine amateur-style video with a pay-to-view scheme? Even if some of the material is free, how can they think we'll fiddle with figuring anything out to get to it? If a blog says "go here" to see video, in this day of YouTube, the click better go straight to a simple, easy-to-play video.

"... because the gay-rights debate has been transformed in the two decades since, not least by his own writing."

From a long article about Andrew Sullivan, a good recounting of this part of his story, which if you don't like Sullivan or understand why I read him, you need to know:

Yet Sullivan wrote the first major article in America calling for gay people to be given the right to marry—and he was savaged by other gays. His talks were picketed by a group called the Lesbian Avengers, who waved signs with Sullivan’s head in the crosshairs of a gun. In gay bars he was denounced as a “collaborator” and physically attacked. He was anathemised by mainstream gay-rights organisations, who refused to engage with him. Why?

The Village Voice writer Richard Goldstein spoke for this tendency when he claimed that Sullivan was “promoting the bargain of assimilation. But this deal comes with a price. It requires gays to maintain the illusion that we’re just like straights… [But] we were interested in messing with the codes of sexuality.” By advocating marriage, Sullivan was opting into the very system gay people should destroy. He was just “Rush Limbaugh with monster pecs,” a self-hater who “would solve the faggot problem by urging gay men not to act like fags”.

Today, marriage is the Number One demand of the gay-rights movement. So why was Sullivan demonised for being the first to articulate it? He says now, haltingly: “It was the middle of a plague, we were all dying, and here’s this brash British guy who’s a Catholic and right-winger talking about something unfamiliar, that challenges their assumptions… [But] I was too narcissistic to realise that it wasn’t about me.”

If you happened to be gay back then, you were supposed to join the left and contribute to the enterprise of smashing conventions. Now, I think there still is an undercurrent of hating heterosexuals out there, and I often feel it coming from Andrew Sullivan, but I'm not going to elaborate on that now.

Please do. You can't throw that out there with no back-up. I'm sorry if my perhaps uncharitable snark about her impending marriage offended her. Probably not my best moment. But the notion that I somehow "hate heterosexuals" is so nutty, not to say meaningless, that I don't know how to respond. I hate 97 percent of humanity? I hate my mum and dad and brother and sister? I hate my co-workers? Just because I think Sarah Palin is a whack-job makes me a heterophobe? Please, Ann. You don't campaign for twenty years to enter a heterosexual institution because you hate heterosexuals. You don't argue for social integration of gays and straights because you hate straights. You don't write a book urging that sexual orientation cease to be a defining social divide if you are a gay separatist. And it takes Goldstein-level dishonesty to say as much.

Well, Sullivan obviously knows what is giving me the feeling of heterophobia coming from him. His weird obsession with Sarah Palin's pregnancy and his reaction to my engagement. He never answered my question "what part of my experience deserves 'OMFG.'" He said:

And I'm all in favor of the right of straight bloggers to marry their straight commenters. It's a civil right. And more than I am currently allowed after living with my husband for almost five years.

And my response was:

This isn't about legal rights. This is about how individuals treat each other, and I want to know why you disrespected me. Explain why you linked to Pandagon's scurrilous OMFG, which, as you know, means "Oh, my fucking God." Is that the way you mean to speak to me? Is that the way you talk about God?

I never saw an answer to that. And as I said in this other post, I do not see how his reaction to me fits with his interest in extending marriage to gay couples:

I too think that Sullivan's reaction to me was detrimental to the cause of same-sex marriage (for which he has fought so admirably). Obviously, he had to have thought he was serving his cause by asserting that his 5-year relationship deserved more respect than mine, but he has a tragic blind spot. He was acting as though it's perfectly fine to trash someone else's relationship because it strikes you at a gut level as wrong. But that's how millions of people feel about his relationship! If we start arguing in that emotional mode, your cause is doomed.

I think Sullivan's reaction is probably complicated. He wants gay relationships to be accepted and given equal respect, and he seems angry that it hasn't happened yet. He struck out at me with derision and contempt and I felt the hostility. He couldn't explain it then, and he doesn't explain it now.

One can be outraged at an exclusion and still dislike the people who are included. For example, I would be outraged by a private club that barred women from membership but might simultaneously hate the men who actually were members. I'd want the right to join even if I didn't want to join, because I disapprove of the discrimination.

I know Sullivan takes strong positions and stands his ground, and I don't really expect him to do this, but I think it would be cool if he would openly explore what might be complex feelings about heterosexuals — especially women.

GG's point — and he does have a point in his too-verbose-to-quote text — is that the Bush administration started the spying on domestic political groups so it's too late for righties to convincingly bitch about it.

But why haven't I posted about the tea party protests? A longstanding issue in blogging is the interpretation of the failure to post. Too many people think the absence of posts indicates an opinion of mine that the topic isn't important, when only it means that I have nothing I want to say on the subject.

You know, despite what might look like massive evidence here on this blog, I'm not too interested in politics. And I've never been attracted to demonstrations and protests. I instinctively avert my eyes — unless I'm there in real life with a camera and I have some hope of catching a view of something quirky or weird. I've participated in exactly one demonstration in my entire life — back in 1970. I went along with chanting a chant — it happened to be "Open it up/Or shut it down" — and I felt rather embarrassed to be doing something completely out of character for me.

I'm aloof and bemused about things political, you see, and I have been for more decades than — in all likelihood — you've been alive.

But it is Tax Day. I'm not steamed about Tax Day. I've done my taxes. I minimized the stress by using Turbo Tax. I noted with a smidge of disgust that the PDF of my returns is 57 pages long, but I moved on.

Nevertheless, I see that Glenn Reynolds has an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about the tea parties, so here:

Today American taxpayers in more than 300 locations in all 50 states will hold rallies -- dubbed "tea parties" -- to protest higher taxes and out-of-control government spending....

The movement grew so fast that some bloggers at the Playboy Web site -- apparently unaware that we've entered the 21st century -- suggested that some secret organization must be behind all of this. But, in fact, today's technology means you don't need an organization...

There's good news and bad news in this phenomenon for establishment politicians. The good news for Republicans is that, while the Republican Party flounders in its response to the Obama presidency and its programs, millions of Americans are getting organized on their own. The bad news is that those Americans, despite their opposition to President Obama's policies, aren't especially friendly to the GOP....

This influx of new energy and new talent is likely to inject new life into small-government politics around the nation. The mainstream Republican Party still seems limp and disorganized. This grassroots effort may revitalize it. Or the tea-party movement may lead to a new third party that may replace the GOP, just as the GOP replaced the fractured and hapless Whigs.

April 14, 2009

I'm live-blogging this one, kids. Quentin Tarantino is guest-judging. I loved him in '04 — "JPL, you are the geekiest rock singer since Freddie and the Dreamers--all right?--but when you get into your geek mode--all right?--there's no one quite like you" — and I'm thrilled to see him back tonight.

7:07: Allison Iraheta is singing "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing." (The theme is music from movies.) Q thinks she's gonna do a great job. She shrieks about watching "you" sleep. The judges talk about spicy sauce (because she's Hispanic?). Simon says she's the girls' only hope, disrespecting Lil.

7:15: Anoop Desai does "Everything I Do I Do For You," and I realize I've long thought of it as the same song as "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing." Just move the words around a little and get your instant movie generic love song. Q wants Anoop to growl out the words. Q punches the air to demonstrate and, with that big jaw of his, he looks like Popeye. Anoop has a nice tone to his voice and he's modestly soulful.

7:20: Q only "got a taste" of Adam Lambert, who's doing "Born to Be Wild," and he's excited about tasting the whole thing. Adam is going to take the world in a love embrace. I just love this guy. Very thrilling and cool performance. (Hey, did I ever tell you I saw Steppenwolf in concert in 1970?) Simon tries to criticize him by saying "It was a little like watching the 'Rocky Horror' musical in parts." And Adam's all "I love that musical!"

7:29: "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman." Incredible. I've also long thought of that as the same song as "Miss a Thing"/"Everything I Do." Is everything by Bryan Adams? Matt Giraud, the boring guy who's supposed to remind us of Justin Timberlake. Q tells him to enunciate. He's pretty bad.

7:39: Danny Gokey is doing "Endless Love" and Q's advice is to put his hands in his pockets. Which he isn't doing. Blah. I hate this. Maybe I just hate everything now that Adam is gone. Simon gives him a boost by alluding to Gokey's dead wife — the song must have been "hard" for him to sing.

7:49: Kris Allen is doing some song I've never heard of from a movie I didn't quite catch the name of. Something about a sinking boat. Q has nothing interesting to say to him. The judges are judging 2 at a time, which means we only get to hear from Simon with every other performer. I guess it would be too mean to just kick Kara off the show, but that would be a much better way to save time.

7:59: Lil Rounds — who I said they were overpromoting — is given the finale spot, and she's singing "The Rose" — which Trooper York said Allison should sing. Q tells her to commit to both parts of the song, not just the gospel half. Tedious. Simon tells her she's "getting this completely wrong." And he's been telling her that over and over and he's "getting frustrated." Lil talks back. "I put it in there" she raves as the TiVo times out. So that's the last thing a lot of people will hear. Maybe some will like the feistiness, but it's dangerous to sass the judges on this middle of the road show, even when what they're telling you is — as Simon said just now — that you're too middle of the road.

ALAN Cooper specialises in ancient DNA. When he came to Australia in 2005 to be director of the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, he was keen to find and analyse the droppings of the country's megafauna, creatures such as giant marsupial diprotodon and the giant short-faced kangaroo, which became extinct more than 45,000 years ago.

Here's a picture of two Smart cars sharing a single parking space. I took the picture in Paris a couple years ago.

In my spare time I am a volunteer firefighter/EMT. The first time I saw a Smart car in the US I was in the back of our rescue (big truck that carries extrication tools for cutting people out of crumpled cars). The driver who is a very experienced firefighter said, "Let's follow them, they're going to need us."

"And he was able to create out of this gift these extraordinary records, these grandiloquent dreams of romance and love and escape, and fling those back into the face of the world. It was flinging them at his father, who killed himself; flinging at the kids who wouldn't talk to him at school; flinging it at the record industry, who thought he was a madman. These records were Spector's revenge."Unfortunately, Phil Spector was quite insane.

Insanity and insecurity haunted Spector's entire life. His older sister had to be institutionalized, and his father committed suicide when the boy was 9. The traumatized family moved from New York to Los Angeles. Spector's first hit, at age 18, was inspired by the inscription on his father's grave: "To Know Him Is to Love Him."

Pay attention, Beck. He said he was passing out. Enough about the cancerous treasuries already.

And now you know the answer to the question what would it take for Althouse to blog about Glenn Beck. To be fair, his name does appear once in the Althouse archive, back in November 2008, as #23 on a list of right wingers loved by right-wing bloggers.

(I got a kick out of digging up that old post, for reasons revealed in an update I just added to it.)

From an article about the court's refusal to annul the marriage of an 8-year-old girl on the petition of her mother, who is separated from her father, who arranged the marriage to a 47-year-old man to whom he was indebted. The man has agreed not to consummate the marriage until the girl reaches puberty and the girl is permitted to seek an annulment herself at that time.

"I am often surprised by the virtual nobility that seems to be accorded those with grievances. Shouldn’t there at least be equal time for our Bill of Obligations and our Bill of Responsibilities?"

Said Justice Clarence Thomas, who admits to being "morose sometimes," who retreats to his basement to rewatch "Saving Private Ryan" when things get "particularly routine," and who gets down on his knees and prays for strength, wisdom, and courage — but not the right answer — to decide difficult cases.

The linked article is by Adam Liptak, who curiously fails to see the humor in Thomas's mention of the dormant commerce clause.

[Douglas] Plude, 42, was convicted of first-degree intentional homicide in 2002. But the Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out the conviction last year after learning that an expert witness who conducted the first round of toilet tests exaggerated his credentials....

Prosecutors... say he poisoned her with a migraine drug and pushed her face into the toilet to drown her while she vomited.

Plude says his wife was depressed, committed suicide by taking the pills on her own and then drowned. He claims he found his wife slumped over the vomit-filled toilet and tried to perform CPR to keep her alive.

Prosecutors called on expert witness Saami Shaibani to shoot down Plude's story at the first trial.

Shaibani said that, based on his tests involving volunteers he positioned at a toilet, Plude had to be lying about the positions he claimed to have found his wife in. Genell Plude also could not have inhaled toilet water on her own and someone must have forced her head into the water, he testified.

Defense lawyers from across the country have derided the tests and call them an example of unfair expert testimony. One of them, North Carolina lawyer David Rudolf, who clashed with Shaibani in another case, laughed about the tests in an interview last year.

"He had women sticking their heads in toilets!" he said. "That's just not science. How do you peer review that? How do you test his conclusions?"

"Throughout history, horses have paid an excruciating price as we built our civilizations on their backs, forced them into our bloody wars and bestowed on them the agonizing fate of being the predominant mode of transportation. Humanity owes the horse, and a 21st-century horse-loving nation ought to ensure a life, and death, of dignity for these animals."

An estimated 100,000 horses a year are shipped to Canada and Mexico for slaughter, prompting Congress to consider a bill that would ban the sale and transport of horses for human consumption outside the country. But Arkansas, Georgia and eight other states are against such a ban, saying owners need affordable options for unwanted horses.

Last week in Montana, the Legislature approved a bill allowing the construction of horse-slaughter facilities....

“Bottom line is you have to separate the animal from the pet,” said State Representative Edward B. Butcher, a Republican who wrote the Montana bill.

Butcher....

“No one has to send a horse to a processing plant,” he added. “It’s just an option for horses that are unusable. And it’s much more humane than leaving them there to starve to death.”

There are a lot of issues here — including federalism, one of my favorite issues: Is this a matter that ought to be dealt with at the state or the national level?

But what I'm most interested in myself is the letter-writer's argument. Should we take a moral position on the individual animal in light of the historical contribution of the species? Is it okay to slaughter cattle — because they were always only about food — but not okay to slaughter horses — because of all the work they've done for us? Some horses have gone to battle, so all horses should be honored? Is this a good moral argument?

What can we do about justices who cling to power that they are no longer completely fit to exercise? District and court of appeals judges are subject to Circuit Judicial Councils, which look into citizens’ grievances against their conduct (though not their specific rulings).

Councils may then investigate and conduct hearings in confidence, and then perhaps order that at least temporarily no further cases be assigned to the judge whose conduct is in question. A council may censure a judge either privately or by a public pronouncement, or request his retirement. If a judge rejects a council’s advice, it could issue a statement to be considered by the House of Representatives that might initiate an impeachment proceeding.

Congress could establish a very similar process to apply to the justices....

This is not to suggest that any of our current Supreme Court justices should be addressed by such a discipline committee. But the mere existence of such a process would serve to remind our mortal justices that they have a right to serve during good behavior, not for life.

I don't think this is such a great idea. We all can see what the Supreme Court Justices are doing. There's no need for a special council with the work of scrutinizing them. It would either be too political — pressuring Justices based on how much various politicians like or want to appear to like the outcomes they've voted for — or it would be suspected of being that.

The symposium on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's life on and before the Supreme Court had all the trappings of a grand finale: laudatory tributes, scholarly evaluations of her jurisprudence, a running theme about her love of opera and her unfulfilled desire to be a great diva.

Conspicuously missing was any mention of an exit from the stage.

If anything, Ginsburg's appearance at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law -- and at a host of other events since the 76-year-old justice had surgery in February to remove a cancerous pancreatic tumor -- seemed intended to send a contrary message....

In a video tribute shown at Friday's day-long symposium, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. offered "my warm congratulations on the occasion of your reaching the midpoint of your tenure."

The midpoint. Get it? Oh, isn't that cute? Nothing but warm support and encouragement for staying on as long as her heart desires it.

But I bet we can't stop talking like that. It would be mean. And it's wrong to discriminate based on age. Blah blah blah blah. Ugh! Maybe I should endorse Carrington's proposal!

I don’t read Ms. Althouse... But I was arrested by Mr Sullivan’s response to what ought to be a celebration-worthy event — an engagement! —: his post was titled No Comment Possible.

Of course, saying “no comment possible” is, by itself, a ton of comment. In fact, Mr Sullivan comments further: “Ten days of emailing … and she was ready” (the slut!) and quotes another blog, the famously moderate and even-keeled Pandagon: “OMFG.”

The disdain is palpable.

Go to the link Gobry's story of meeting his fiancée on Facebook and his defense of on-line meetings. I'm continuing with the part about Sullivan. Gobry notes the "cognitive dissonance":

Mr Sullivan is, after all, one of the most talented and articulate proponents of same-sex marriage, and no doubt needs no education on the discrimination, both soft and hard, that can befall human beings based on their relationships. Yet he doesn’t miss a beat in responding derisively to Ms Althouse’s engagement even though… Who cares?

What should be treated as an unremarkable event, worthy of cheer if anything, is held up for derision, by someone who ought to know better. So I felt the need to speak up.

Yes, I too think that Sullivan's reaction to me was detrimental to the cause of same-sex marriage (for which he has fought so admirably). Obviously, he had to have thought he was serving his cause by asserting that his 5-year relationship deserved more respect than mine, but he has a tragic blind spot. He was acting as though it's perfectly fine to trash someone else's relationship because it strikes you at a gut level as wrong. But that's how millions of people feel about his relationship! If we start arguing in that emotional mode, your cause is doomed.

The first comment chez Gobry is quite something:

is this post about althouse or about you?

Look, it’s not that complicated. Online relationships are weird. Flirting between a blogger and a random commentator is double weird. Marriage after three dates is just fucking stupid. Toss in a raging storm of Ann Althouse hatred, plus Althouse’s own special brand of comic cluelessness, and you got a fun little story to pick over for a while. The bizzaro [sic] marriage is a final confirmation of what we all already knew, namely that this woman is batshit insane.

As for minding our own business? If Althouse didn’t want people to gossip about her private life, then maybe she shouldn’t have posted about it on the internet.

I love that Gobry responds right away in the next comment:

Actually, it’s about Sullivan and a few others.

And look, I disagree with you. Online relationships are no longer weird. Online dating services have been around for more than a decade now and countless people use them. And here in France, people have been using the Minitel to date since the 80s. Note that I haven’t used online dating services, but I honestly don’t see how anyone should find them weird in 2009.

Same thing with flirting between a blogger and a commentator. Why? I mean, honestly: why? Why is it weird? Why is it any weirder than, say, flirting with someone in line at Starbucks?

And marriage after three dates being “fucking stupid”… What particular expertise do you claim on the subject? I have friends who dated for like 5 years, moved in together, and then broke up after 3 weeks. That, to me, is fucking stupid. If a friend has met someone and wants to get engaged after three dates, I might be surprised and curious, but I haven’t been in his shoes, how the hell can I claim it’s stupid? I mean, seriously?

We’re talking about two private individuals we don’t know, who have made a decision that by definition none of us can understand because we haven’t been in their shoes and can’t understand their innermost motives, and yet we feel entitled to heap judgmental scorn on them.

That’s what’s pretty fucking stupid, in my opinion.

A good comment, from matoko_chan:

I thought Althouse’s love story was charming and romantic.

It is like a chaste victorian correspondence.

Since love and sexuality are initiated by brain function, what better way to really get to know someone, than as a pure intelligence scraped off of physical packaging and environmental distractions?

After 4 years of meeting minds, I think Ann Althouse and her sweetheart have a much better chance than most.

To give Andrew credit, I think he wonders if Althouse’s erstwhile suitor presented himself factually. After four years, I would believe the guy.

It is true that stalkers and predators roam the virtual spaces, but 4 years should be enough to reveal it.

Stalkers and predators are everywhere, on-line and off. You've got to look out. But who would spend 4 years writing comments on a blog to get at some 58-year-old lady in Madison, Wisconsin? You might as well worry that your spouse of 20 years is just faking the whole damned thing. Or that you yourself are a big empty fraud.

[A] dramatic and successful rescue operation by U.S. Special Operations forces... left Obama with an early victory that could help build confidence in his ability to direct military actions abroad.

Throughout the past four days, White House officials played down Obama's role in the hostage drama. Until yesterday, he made no public statements about the pirates.

In fact, aides said yesterday, Obama had been briefed 17 times since he returned from his trip abroad, including several times from the White House Situation Room. And without giving too many details, senior White House officials made it clear that Obama had provided the authority for the rescue.

"The president's focus was on saving and protecting the life of the captain," one adviser said. Friday evening, after a National Security Council telephone update, Obama granted U.S. forces what aides called "the authority to use appropriate force to save the life of the captain." On Saturday at 9:20 a.m., Obama went further, giving authority to an "additional set of U.S. forces to engage in potential emergency actions."

Thanks to President Obama for the military victory and for giving us and himself confidence in his ability and willingness to use the military.

The operation pales in scope and complexity to the wars underway in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Obama's adversaries are unlikely to be mollified by his performance in a four-day hostage drama.

Hey, I'm mollified. (Or does that make me not an Obama adversary? I did vote for him, but I'm always dogging him for one thing or another.) Mollify me some more, Obama. Build on this victory.

Nonetheless, it may help to quell criticism leveled at Obama that he came to office as a Democratic antiwar candidate who could prove unwilling or unable to harness military might when necessary.

happy easteri love easter it s so hopefuland the food isn t badmom and dad here at the houseare having some friends overfor easter dinner yay crumbsand maybe lots of other goodies if momis sloppy as usual i adore hollandaise sauceone of mom s good friends who s comingis jewish and her husband is oirishfrom the old sod plus there are themexican chinese jewish polish coupleand remember mom is french sowelcome to cambridgewhich is identity enough for all the kidswho happily say grace over dinnerand love to hunt easter eggswhile i m under the fridge waitingfor hollandaise sauce from heavenhoping they don t decide to looktoo carefully for those eggs

1) Word used in place of general explicit language in order to soften the emotion of the language.2) A person acting in a silly manor3) An endearing way to address a friend4) An omen of good fashion5) One's genitalia

1) "What the diddley?" 2) "She's quite the diddley." 3) "Diddley, I love you." 4) "May the diddley be with you." 5) *pokes you in the diddley*